Impairments of word recognition in Alzheimer's disease (AD) have been less widely investigated than impairments affecting word retrieval and production. In particular, we know little about what makes individual words easier or harder for patients with AD to recognize. We used a lexical selection task in which participants were shown sets of four items, each set consisting of one word and three non‐words. The task was simply to point to the word on each trial. Forty patients with mild‐to‐moderate AD were significantly impaired on this task relative to matched controls who made very few errors. The number of patients with AD able to recognize each word correctly was predicted by the frequency, age of acquisition, and imageability of the words, but not by their length or number of orthographic neighbours. Patient Mini‐Mental State Examination and phonological fluency scores also predicted the number of words recognized. We propose that progressive degradation of central semantic representations in AD differentially affects the ability to recognize low‐imageability, low‐frequency, late‐acquired words, with the same factors affecting word recognition as affecting word retrieval.

中文翻译：

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阿尔茨海默氏病中的单词识别：语义退化的影响。

与阿尔兹海默氏病（AD）的单词识别障碍相比，对影响单词检索和产生的损伤的研究还不广泛。尤其是，对于使AD患者更容易或更难识别单个单词的原因，我们知之甚少。我们使用了一项词汇选择任务，其中向参与者显示了四个项目的集合，每个集合由一个单词和三个非单词组成。任务只是指向每次审判的用词。相对于失误极少的匹配对照组，有40例轻度至中度AD患者严重受损。能够正确识别每个单词的AD患者人数是根据单词的出现频率，获取年龄和图像可成像性来预测的，而不是根据单词的长度或正交拼字邻居的数量来预测的。病人迷你心理状态检查和语音流利度分数也可以预测所识别单词的数量。我们提出，AD中中心语义表示的逐步退化会不同程度地影响识别低图像性，低频，后期获取单词的能力，而影响单词识别的因素与影响单词检索的因素相同。